The Voice and the Vehicle: An Interview with Terence Stamp

“Would you like a coffee?” he asks politely, and proceeds to pour when I accept. And so I am served a cup of joe by Terence Stamp, who first visited Edinburgh in 1959 with Michael Caine, performing at The King's Theatre at the dawn of their careers. He's in town today with his new film Song for Marion, which is screening across the road from the King's at the Cameo. In between he has shared a flat with Caine, a bed with Julie Christie, rocked Rome with Fellini and baulked at Brando’s unwillingness to learn lines. He has truly lived a life. Even now he can drop ‘Larry’ (Olivier) into conversation without missing a beat.

Yet his most significant names-drops are those of his parents. Song for Marion deals primarily with the relationships between husband and wife, father and son. Stamp plays Arthur, the family patriarch unable to articulate the love he feels for these familial bonds; an inability ingrained in his working class generation. In one scene when Arthur is asked why he never expressed parental pride, he defends himself inadequately with "I told everyone else."

I wonder whether Stamp himself experienced similar barriers when embarking on his creative path from a non-theatrical background; how did his much-grounded family react to this move out with their class-bound expectations? “Well, very differently," Stamp tells me. "I always wanted to do it, but it was my secret. I don’t know why I didn’t speak to anybody about it. But I didn’t start until we got our first TV and I must have been about seventeen. I was still living at home and I started saying things like ‘I could do better than that.’ My Dad, he was stoic, he didn’t say anything. Then the third or fourth time I said it he just said ’People like us don’t do things like that.’" 

Stamp's eyes are baby blue, sparkling in an insurrection to his seventy-four years. Then, as the conversation hardens, so do they, into marble it seems, and he steels his gaze and continues: “I went to argue and he said ‘Son, I don’t want you to talk about it anymore.’ Now, in retrospect, he was just trying to save me heartache, wasn’t he? He had never earned more than twelve quid a week. He was a stoker. He was one up from a galley slave in the merchant Navy.” And how did he feel when you did start to succeed? “I don’t know, because he never spoke about it. But the thing was, my mother who had always dreamed of me doing something special, said, 'I’d like you to be something that there’s only one of, like a Pope,'” he laughs. “I didn’t realise that she was handing on the baton. I never had a father, as such, who supported me or guided me, taught me how to box or anything. But I had this powerful chick! A Leo, born in the year of the tiger! I guess one of the greatest pleasures in my life is that I had them for like 25 years of my fame and I think that both my mother and father were very proud in different ways.”

Song for Marion trailer

After the previous night’s screening Stamp spoke eloquently about a certain feeling he had at precise moments throughout his career, spiritual occurrences where he grew to become more than he felt he alone could be, “like a degree of sensitivity that’s not present in everyday life.” The first was his big moment in Billy Budd (a role which earned him a best supporting actor Oscar nomination), and these continued sporadically. “It was like a hook which was pulling me along...there was a whole scene in The Hit when I was repeating a John Donne sonnet where I could feel this type of presence. [Song for Marion] was the first time it was there almost continuously.” 

This has been the only job where he has taken the gamble of turning up on set unprepared and emotionally empty, relying upon this unknown energy to fill the void. Perhaps this was due to his character’s paternal connection, I wonder? “I don’t think I was channelling my Dad or anything," he tells me, "but I felt that it was the fact that it was the first time that I had that idea of embracing somebody really close to me in a characterisation.” I presume to have seen these instances in the film, moments of truth as I thought of them, present in the meeting of eyes or the beginning of a smile, and it raises these tender scenes between Stamp and Vanessa Redgrave out of the ordinary. Their on-screen relationship compares with that of his own parents' – “the highest unit between a man and a woman really.” He relates it to two almonds growing within one shell, the question and the answer. “I came across it in literature. I was living in India but I was also studying the Shakespeare of the East, Rumi. He deals with the twin soul of the relationship, what he calls the lover and the beloved.” 

And there begins India, the location of his nine year sojourn during the seventies. In place of studying the craft he studied life, in what might be seen as a chrysalis stage, transforming him from leading man to character actor. “I hated to admit it because I was still young, you understand?" he says when I ask about this career switch. "And I always looked after myself because I understood that if I kept the vehicle in shape I wouldn’t need to be playing broken down drunks. I was in very good shape when I came back. I’d been in an ashram for a year. But I didn’t realise how wonderful it was – I was a leading man who’d become a character actor. Admittedly it was shouting and screaming and not wanting it. But that was the big shift that enabled me to have a long career. It was a crisis for my idea of myself, my ego.” 

I can believe this. He seems to revel in his looks with an actor’s vanity; he refers to his beauty unselfconsciously. At the Cameo Q&A after the Song for Marion screening he admitted initial reservations about the everyday nature of his current part, due to his handsome features. I expected a knowing wink, but it never came: he means it. The transformation therefore must have been difficult, but one he now sees in a different light, as a process of sublimation. “A side effect of my life in the East is that I was being refined," he explains. "I didn’t think of it in those terms, but that’s what was happening. The first thing you start studying in the east is the breath. As your breath gets fuller it becomes finer, and as the condition under which we are here, the vehicle becomes finer.” 

And from this breath came those famous tones full of class and gravitas, the voice of an actor with a capital O (act-o-r). I later learn this is no natural gift but the result of an obsessive training schedule. A certain actor once advised him that the voice can extend your career once time steals your looks. “Larry gave me that advice, but I hadn’t really known how to process it. When Billy Bud came out there was a review, it said ‘Mr Stamp’s naturally light voice suits this role perfectly.’ Now I didn’t see this as being a good review. I didn’t like the fact that my voice was considered light because I had big ideas about what I wanted to play in those days. I wanted to play Hamlet and thought, 'What’s this shit about light voice?' I wanted the opposite of that. The voice was a side effect of studying the esoteric of breathing and the importance of being and how the blood itself is infused with the oxygen and the oxygen is dependent on the depth and purchase of the breath.”

At times as we speak he seems to power down, absorbing my questions then pausing an almost uncomfortable age. With his white shock of hair he resembles Rutger Hauer in Bladerunner; head down. ‘time to die.’ But then he resurrects himself, looking up before delivering a perfectly measured answer. The moment this goes out of the window, when animation overcomes the training, is when he talks of Fellini. “[He] was a great hero of mine, and also he was one of the lads. I had a similar relationship with Fellini that I’d had with [William] Wyler [Who directed him in The Collector], except when I went to work with Fellini I was 27 and was at an age where I could appreciate him more. I never really appreciated Wyler in the way that I was able to appreciate Fellini. The idea that Fellini had chosen me, admittedly after O’Toole, but he had decided that I was good enough to play a leading man and I was the first English actor to play a lead for Fellini.” 

Of course he’s also worked with modern greats like Bryan Singer and Steven Soderbergh; a ‘seize the day’ kind of guy, it seems: “That’s Soderbergh’s nature, he’s the camera, he feels it through the lens. So The Limey was only ever single takes. Except for that one big speech where the wonderful Bill Duke says [affects American accent] ‘What the fuck are you talking about?!’ ” 

He can honestly begin a sentence with “What Brando said to me was that...” and has bellowed "kneel before Zod!” in Superman’s face. A man of many seasons; of sixties heyday pomp and seventies retreat. Of the blockbuster bonanza of the 80s and 90s and now, with his cracked granite performance in Song for Marion, proving to be a vital artist to this day. Legacy is a strange thing. Once you’ve built one you‘re presumably at an age to lament it. Yet for Stamp it is simple, “If Song for Marion were my last performance, I would rest easy with that.”